Mattel Q&A: June 1st, 2011

1. With the recent appearance of Frankenberry in the HotWheels line, is a series of monster cereal action figures being considered for perhaps MattyCollector? It seems like lots of fans would buy a semi-poseable Count Chocula and friends!

You will need to hit up Hotwheelscollector.com or the Redlineclub.com for this info. Here at Mattycollector.com we only handle action figure brands. (but for the sake of sanity, we will be selling the SDCC item on our site, all other indo however should be addressed to the Hot Wheels Collector sites!)

Editor’s Rant: Okay seriously… WHAT? I asked a pretty straight forward question here and it has NOTHING to do with Hot Wheels. I was asking about ACTION FIGURES and if they would be making any, since they had the license. Did someone really read this question? A simple no would have sufficed! And to further confuse the system, their answer is that they will be selling SDCC exclusive Hot Wheels on the MattyCollector site. But I shouldn’t ask the guys running MattyCollector about it? *head explodes*

2. Tri-Klops hasn’t been re-issued. Is there any particular reason why this figure has been held back from MOTUC re-issues?

No particular reason. But overall we are cutting down on the reissues going forward. You won’t see as many in 2012. Tri-Klops might show up but no plans at this point to announce a re-release for him.

3. With the 12 inch Movie Masters Superman figures wrapped up now, when can we expect an announcement about the next 12 inch line that you guys will be tackling?

At this point, Lex, Superman and Zod will round out our 12” DC line. We still have some remaining stock of these three, but we do not have plans for additional figures in this scale.

Editor’s Rant: So what exactly was the point of developing this new scale? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to release DCUC scaled versions of the Christopher Reeve Superman guys? Instead they created a whole new scale, to sell 3 figures (plus the 4 Ghostbusters) and then call it quits? The lack of consistency here boggles the mind.

4. Distribution on DCUC finally seems to be improving some, as I’ve now seen Joker in the flesh (plastic?) for the first time since he was released over a year ago. However, the quality control seems to still have some issues as that Joker had various poor paint applications and distress in the package. What has been the biggest challenge with trying to improve QC and what do you hope to achieve going forward?

Consistency in paint opps and keeping costs down tend to be out biggest challenges for the DC line. We hope things have continued to improve!

5. While many are cautiously optimistic about the “rubber” flesh on Swamp Thing, if this proves to be a success, could we potentially see this used on other DCUC and MOTUC characters if it was deemed appropriate? Or is this just a random, one time usage.

Swamp Thing is indeed a test to see how this type of articulation does. If it is something fans like it is possible we could apply this (when it works aesthetically) to other characters down the road. We’ll have to see what fans say once they have him in their hands!